Why spend more time auditing your competitors’ social media accounts when there are so many excellent tools that can do it for you in a couple of seconds? We’ve already covered social media analytics tools so, in this article, we have gathered a list of helpful solutions specifically for social media auditing. The below list of tools can help you better analyze your competitors’ social media accounts and improve your social media game. Discover top 6 competitor audit tools.

Let’s dive into what competitors’ social media audit looks like, how to run one, and tools to help you create the most effective audit for your needs.

What is a social media audit? 

A social media audit is a process of collecting and analyzing competitors’ social media data and content strategy to discover valuable and actionable insights. The goal of a social media audit is to benchmark your social presence against the competition based on an analysis of your strengths and weaknesses.  

Depending on the end goal, usually auditing competitors involves answering the following questions: 

1. Who is their audience?
2. What types of content are competitors posting?
3. What types of content generate the highest engagement rates?
4. Is their posting consistent?
5. When are followers active?
6. What can we do to improve our presence?

Competitors’ audit is an excellent planning resource and roadmap for future social media strategies. Usually, teams organize spreadsheets or simple documents with a list of content ideas that work and new market trends to implement. 

But most importantly, it answers the question, “Is our social media performance good enough?” 

How to run a social media competitor audit?

Although running a 360-degree audit can be an option to serve broad needs, in general, if you have a specific goal in mind, that would simplify the efforts. Since, instead of collecting all types of social data, you’ll focus on a few essential metrics. 

Related article: Collect meaningful data for a better ROI using Sociality.io Report Module

Do you want to improve your social ads performance or overall content strategy? Or do you need to identify benchmarks for engagement and interaction rates? Do you like to learn what hashtags perform the best?

After identifying what insight you aim to discover, it is time to collect metrics into an organized place. It can either be a spreadsheet, like the one provided in the link or adapt experiments planning template from Airtable. 

For example, as a social media marketer, my goal is to identify competitors’ top-performing content to understand what would work for our audience, too. 

• My goal is to prepare a list of 20 content ideas from competitors’ top-performing content. 
• I need to organize a list of competitors’ social media accounts I am planning to analyze. I can either focus on all social media networks or narrow it down to only Instagram, for example. 
• With the help of auditing tools, I can add competitors’ accounts to the system and filter out them based on engagement rates. 
• Organize and prioritize the top 20 ideas into a spreadsheet and share them with my colleagues. 

Note: some solutions will allow you to categorize Paid vs. Organic engagement. For example, you can include only content that wasn’t boosted or promoted. 

In the spreadsheet that you’re going to create, we recommend adding an action column. This column will let your marketing team know what to focus on based on the analysis and go from there. All items can further priorities to understand the feasibility of repeating competitors’ successes.

Related article: How to track and analyze competitors’ social media content strategy?

Why use 3rd party social media auditing tools?

• Time-saver: Social media audit tools get you the information you need in significantly less time than it would take you to do it manually. Whether it’s a single-page analysis or comparing different competitors’ performance, such tools are equipped to accomplish these tasks quickly.
• Extra information: When analyzing manually, calculating the engagement rate of a specific page becomes a hassle. And social media platforms don’t let you see the engagement rate of a page that doesn’t belong to you. Thankfully, auditing tools are here to save the day. And they do it very well! 
• Easy to review: Using a tool, you don’t need to set up an Excel or Google Sheet to gather the info. Reports generated by these tools also have visual representations of data that look nice and make the data much easier to process.

Top paid and free social media audit tools

1. Sociality.io

First up is Sociality.io, and we know, we know, this is our tool, but this isn’t a shameless advertisement. We include our tool with the rest of these fantastic tools because we worked hard to make this tool meet the highest industry standards and needs from day one. Most importantly, it feels great to have Sociality.io in such a great company. 

Sociality.io is an all-in-one social media management tool that also comes with great competitor analysis tools. You can audit your competitors’ Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Instagram Business pages. 

Sociality.io unlimited reports are exportable in PPT and Excel formats include the following metrics:

• Total fans/followers/subscribers growth
• Number of pages posts 
• Post types
• Number of total interactions with separate graphs for each interaction type (number of reactions, likes, replies, etc.) 
• Engagement rates
• Post days 
• Post hours 
• Detailed performance metrics of published and deleted content 
• Paid vs. organic engagement

If you are interested in giving Sociality.io a try, don’t hesitate, start a free 14-day trial! Pricing starts at $99/mo: https://sociality.io/pricing.

2. Followerwonk

Followerwonk is a great tool to audit your competitors’ Twitter pages. It specializes in the “bluebird” social media platform and provides great insights into the page and its following. And what’s great is they offer a free version. All you need to do is log in with your Twitter account.

Followerwonk mainly focuses on follower analysis. Compare Users, Analyze, Track Followers, and Sort Followers tools let you dive deep into little details of your competitor’s following. Everything from demographics to active hours on Twitter and so much more. 

You can also use the tool to analyze popular hashtags used by your competitors and their followers on Twitter. Additionally, you can also analyze the accounts your competitors follow to see which influencers they follow and whether they follow their active fans or not. 

Just keep in mind that Followerwonk’s free plan lets you analyze an account for free as long as it has less than 35k followers. So for accounts with a larger following, you will need to purchase a subscription that starts at $29/month. Either way, we highly encourage you to give Followerwonk a try.

3. Phlanx

Phlanx is another social media management platform that has a great tool that lets you calculate the engagement rate for your competitor’s Instagram pages for free. You can also use it to generate a full Instagram audit, but for that, you will need a subscription. As mentioned above, manually calculating the engagement rate is a daunting task, and why do it yourself when you can do it for free with this amazing tool?

Phlanx’s paid subscription currently starts at 35$/month if you get a monthly subscription. It gives unlimited access to Phlanx’s tools for one account. 

4. Mention

Mention is like a sophisticated Google Alerts. It lets you monitor conversations from various sources on the web, including social media platforms. Whether you want to keep track of your brand name mentions or your competitors’, this tool will be there for you. 

This tool will help you audit your competitor’s mentions on the web and social media platforms.

Mention also offers a free version and a 14-day trial for paid versions, which start at a $29/month price point for a monthly subscription. Learn more about their competitor analysis features here.

5. SimilarWeb

SimilarWeb is mainly known as a traffic and keyword analysis tool, but there’s a great use case for social media auditing that might not be obvious to everyone. The tool offers a feature where you can study both inbound and outbound referral social media traffic. This is a great way to understand which social media platform works best for your competitors. Analyze various competitors to see if there are any patterns. Is Twitter bringing the most traffic to similar companies? Or is it Facebook? If so, you’ve got yourself a pretty sweet insight, thanks to SimilarWeb. 

SimilarWeb offers a free package and an enterprise plan without limitations. SimilarWeb doesn’t post pricing, so you have to reach out to the consultants for rates.

6. Ad Library by Facebook

Did you know that Facebook offers a free tool where you can look for ads running or have been running across the social network? Well, now you know! Ad Library is a fantastic free tool to study your competitors’ ad copies on Facebook, and it’s completely free and easy to use.

Use this tool for auditing competitor copies and analyzing what type of content they prefer to promote more. You might find unique insights with this tool.

In conclusion,

Social media audit tools will help you advance your competitor analysis significantly. Even if you don’t want to commit to a subscription yet, thankfully, there are free tools that will give you a taste of how tools improve the process. We’re confident that you wouldn’t want to go back once you tried one of the above mentioned tools. 

Happy analyzing! And before you go, a kind reminder. Whether you’re new to our blog or are a valued follower, we recently published a series about social media competitor analysis and helpful guides on analyzing your competitors on various social networks. Make sure to check out these articles that are linked below. 

• How to conduct a competitor analysis on Facebook
• A step by step guide on using Facebook Insights for competitor analysis
• How to conduct a competitor analysis benchmarking on Twitter [+Template]
• Top 5 social media competitor analysis yools
• How to prepare Instagram competitor analytics report in 5 minutes?